Introduction: science-informed or expert policy advice in the Netherlands

The traditional view casts policy analysis as advice on the authoritative choices that undergird public policies by public servants in a public bureaucracy to political authorities. Because this governmental, instrumental and cognitive conception provides an incomplete view (Radin, 2000), policy-related activities are now more broadly referred to as ‘policy work’ (Colebatch et al, 2010; Kohoutek et al, 2013). This concept captures a broader set of roles and activities in the making of public policies under conditions of networked governance. This chapter's focus is on a special category of policy workers: people working as scientific experts for public policy in advisory bodies and/or knowledge centres. Their capacity and status as experts is precisely derived from their credentials and position in, or knowledge of, science. Qua experts, they are specifically tasked with translating or processing scientific evidence and thought into policy advice. This category of policy workers, apparently because of their scientific expertise, stays rather close to the traditional cognitive role of a policy analyst. However, different from all other types of policy workers, their role obliges them to act as ‘boundary workers’ between science and policy/politics.

The Netherlands has many such expert policy advisers as boundary workers because the country has a highly developed, complex and diverse infrastructure for scienceinformed policy advice. Through the Legal Framework for Advisory Bodies (Kaderwet Adviescolleges) of 1996, the Dutch have legally regulated the frequent use of science-informed policy advice by national government. The law stipulates rules for the establishment, composition, modus operandi and terms of reference of so-called permanent advisory bodies. These bodies have either formally strategic or technical-specialist functions. In addition, there are temporary advisory bodies, established for between four and a maximum of six years, devoted to politically salient but midterm issues. Finally, there are ad hoc or one-off commissions, devoted to a single issue (no yet covered by a permanent or temporary body), which require only a ministerial decree for their establishment.

Apart from the Framework Law for advisory bodies, there are bureaucracy-related sites and arrangements for science-informed policy advice. First, there are the socalled departmental ‘knowledge chambers’.

Policy as a handle on government

‘Policy’ has become one of the central ways in how we talk about government, presenting the process of government as a pattern of systematic action oriented to particular collective concerns. It is a central concept in a narrative of governing in authoritative and instrumental terms: Governments recognize problems and make decisions to bring public authority and resources to bear upon these problems, with ‘policy’ as the expression of these decisions. As we will see, this perspective embodies questions and puzzles for both practitioners and observers, but it occupies centre stage, constituting a framework within which policy concerns are discussed.

In a way, the policy perspective is an alternative to the more traditional ‘politics’ perspective on government that sees it as a competitive struggle for power and the capacity for allocation which goes along with it. Of course, the two cannot be totally separated, as the politics perspective considers one of the fruits of political success as the capacity to steer government through policy, and the policy perspective assumes that political leaders will want to shape the direction of government activity through policy choices. But the politics perspective tends to focus attention on the competitive struggle for the right to choose, while the policy perspective is more concerned with problem solving.

In this narrative of ‘authoritative instrumentalism,’ a central place is given to ‘policymakers,’ although it is not always clear who is being referred to. It also envisages that the policymakers will have ‘policy advisers’ and may also draw on the work of ‘policy analysts.’ We find this unduly specific and limiting in its vision. There are many people whose work is oriented toward policy: political leaders, bureaucrats, professional experts, advocates, interest group representatives, and others. These are the people we call policy workers. They may be employed by the government, or one of a range of bodies concerned about how the authority of government can be brought to bear on problems: think tanks, interest groups, professional bodies, community associations, international organizations, etc. They may be activists, not employed in this sector at all, but committed to policy as a major part of their lives, though, in many cases, these people are drawn into paid employment, often because governments offer grants to issue-focused groups so that they can employ staff and more easily bring their perspective to bear in official circumstances.

Policy is a way of giving meaning to how we are governed; it is an account of governing that focuses on collective concerns, the specialized knowledge of problem areas, and the application of public authority. This account emerges not only in the statements of political leaders and senior bureaucrats (loosely labeled ‘policymakers’), but also from how community and sectional activists make claims, experts are recognized and listened to, officials define and apply categories, and journalists construct stories about the public drama of governing. The questions to be addressed include ‘What is this “all about,” whose responsibility is it, and what can, or should, be done about it?’ Those who are working in policy, whether inside or outside of government, find that their work is concerned with the construction, negotiation and propagation of meaning, which includes discussing problems, identifying and debating appropriate responses to these problems, framing plans, and relating the specific practices of governing to these broader frameworks of meaning in which they are located. Majone (1989) argues that the work of a policy analyst is less like that of a laboratory scientist and more like that of a courtroom lawyer who must table ideas, explore their application, test the utility of competing frameworks, probe their persuasive power to different audiences – in short, he or she must find good arguments for doing things.

This ‘sense-making’ takes place in a variety of ways, not all of them explicitly focused on ‘making policy,’ but policy workers are particularly concerned with two of these ways: writing documents and negotiating with interested parties (‘stakeholders’). The two are closely related because writing documents relates the claims of stakeholders to one another and to existing practice, and stakeholders assert their claims to consideration by producing documents of their own and contesting or endorsing the documents produced by others. So, a large part of policy work is concerned with interaction around the production of authoritative documents. As Noordegraaf (2000) noted, policy managers lead lives dominated by ‘meetings and papers,’ with meetings being held to discuss papers and papers being prepared for meetings. Indeed, some would argue that policy requires an authoritative paper, which is ‘the policy.’

Two of our case studies focus on this process of meaning making, but in quite different contexts.

There is a substantial body of literature on how policy elites engage in policy-making. Moreover, there are numerous textbooks that purport to teach students the proper methods and techniques of policy analysis. However, empirical studies of the work of ‘ordinary,’ mid-level policy workers, inside or outside government, remain rare. This book is part of a small, but growing body of research that seeks to remedy this situation, which includes Page and Jenkins’ Policy Bureaucracy: Government with a Cast of Thousands (2005), and more particularly, Colebatch's The Work of Policy: An International Survey (2006). This book builds on these earlier studies of policy work, adding new perspectives and findings.

First, we have tried to detect whether contemporary accounts of policy work deviate from traditional accounts of policy-making and policy analysis or not. We trace the potential influences of government reforms, such as the drive for New Public Management and the shift towards network governance. We looked at policy work in different countries (mostly the Netherlands, but also Canada and the United States) and in different settings where these trends occur. This includes policy work in the increasingly important setting of transnational regimes, particularly the European Union.

Second, from a more analytical angle, the book explicitly focuses on processes of account giving in the study of policy-making. It focuses on how we – both observers and participants – perceive, frame and actively construe the intrinsically ambiguous phenomenon known as ‘policy.’ It also shows that we are politically and professionally socialized to apply a few standardized and taken-for-granted accounts.

Third, by focusing on the account giving of both observers (scholars and researchers) and participants (practitioners and policy workers), the book seeks to improve the troubled dialogue between the scientific study of public policy and practical policy work.

Fourth, the book focuses primarily on individual policy workers, and on the day-to-day practices that make up policy. We are especially interested in the potentially innovative capacity of policy work. Although policy workers have to act within the constraints of organizational routines and the structured interactions of politics and administration, they must be seen as essentially ‘agents’ that enact policy realities that structure and potentially innovate and change subsequent policy acts.

Discourse about policy tends to be cast in a form that assumes ‘the government’ – either the national government itself, or a body operating on its behalf – which is comprised of authorized leaders who determine goals or set norms, which are then applied in practice by officials. In these accounts, policy can be traced back to sovereign authority.

Increasingly, however, policy work is conducted across national boundaries. New regional bodies are emerging whose ability to make rules can override national government authority, such as the European Union. There are also global regimes such as the World Trade Organization, to which governments yield some of their sovereign authority. There are also areas where sovereignty is disputed, like the Antarctic, but governments have sought to construct acceptable regimes of governing. Two of our case studies concern policy work within the European Union, which is perhaps the most developed of these trans-national regimes. One study is by an official (Woeltjes) reflecting on her own work; the other (Geuijen and 't Hart) reports on research on Dutch officials who deal directly with the EU. They offer a particularly interesting perspective because the policy workers involved in these cases can draw on a number of identities – as officials of functional national agencies, as part of a national engagement with the EU, as ‘good Europeans,’ constructing the new regime, and often, also, as professional experts whose professional knowledge is shared across national boundaries.

There are a number of common themes that emerge from these studies. As Woeltjes points out, the problems that this policy activity is concerned with cannot be contained within national boundaries, and we can see the development of a body of specialized knowledge regarding this problem and its management. Geuijen and 't Hart suggest that the institutionalization of these concerns creates new sites for policy practice, with their own norms, rules and specific practices. This gives rise to ambiguity in the relationship between these locations for international rule-generation and the constitutional formulations, which validate rules by referring back to the national political leadership. In these cases, political leadership remains ambiguous because the leaders may have no particular views on the issues under discussion, or may even avoid taking a position when the issue is considered a ‘hot potato.’ Questions may be described as ‘technical’ when leaders approve of what the officials are doing, and ‘political’ where they disagree.

In this book, scholars and (reflexive) practitioners will tell their ‘stories’ about their work in the field of policy, but first we need to consider the nature of the stories and ‘accounts’ of policy. Talking about ‘policymakers’ implies identifiable actors creating a clearly visible product: ‘policy.’ But when policy is seen in more ambiguous terms, it becomes more difficult to objectively define what the policy ‘is’ or the work that created it. Representing this ambiguous reality as policy is an exercise in interpretation, which is accomplished by policy practices themselves, but also through the scholarly endeavors that analyze the policy-making processes. What is considered ‘policy work’ is part of this process of representation engaged in by both practitioners and observers. So neither ‘policy’ nor ‘policy work’ can be seen as neutral phenomena, instead, they are part of the process of learning how people attempt to understand and shape practice, and relate this to the broader attempts to ‘govern’ societies and channel political processes. This means that values and interests are at stake, and that the outcomes of policy processes will produce both winners and losers, which will no doubt affect the various interpretations. Critical forms of policy analysis, for example, aim not only to represent policies as openly as possible, but also to disclose the processes involved in the creation of policy, the voices heard (and not heard), and to inform and involve those left out of the process. Policy work is an exercise in the social construction of meaning, but the deconstruction of policy through analysis is also part of this policy process.

This section thus focuses on meta-accounts, observations of how accounts of policy work are constructed and utilized. But first we must understand ‘policy’ as a meta-account within our understanding of governing, and within this account, the sort of practices that are explained and validated. Hal Colebatch shows that there are distinct and overlapping accounts of policy that focus on different aspects of the process of governing. Policy can be seen as a process of authoritative choice that emphasizes the positions of leaders, decisions and programs. It can be seen as structured interaction that focuses on the interplay between different participants with distinct agendas.

We have seen that there are different ways of giving an account of policy, and have distinguished between first-, second- and third-order accounts. This section asks the questions: Do these different accounts speak to each other? And if so, how or, how should they speak to each other? This reflects the notion of applying of the ‘double hermeneutic’ to policy. This is a well-known strategy in the social sciences whereby the social practices and the terms that scientists use to describe them, have impact on one another. Policy scientists interpret the language and actions of policy workers; scholars describe these interpretations for practitioners; and practitioners talk to each other, often in the terms introduced by the policy scientists, but they also talk back to the policy academics – and the fact that it is, generally speaking, the policy practitioners who finance the work of the scholars makes these exchanges particularly relevant for an understanding of policy work.

The founding fathers of the policy studies approach in the 1950s and 1960s would have considered this an odd question. Policy science is usually traced back to Harold Lasswell's endeavor to systematically and methodically link the (social) sciences to the needs of long-term, strategic, public policymaking. The first ‘policy analysts’ saw themselves as simply drawing on scientific knowledge (concepts and theories), and giving objective advice to decision makers. This is well expressed in Wildavsky's ‘speaking truth to power’. In subsequent decades, society began talking back louder and louder to science's claims on ‘truth’, a development known as the move from Mode-1 to Mode-2 science, or from normal to post-normal science, or from mono- to multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary science. For policy studies this implied a move from ‘speaking truth to power’ to ‘making sense together.’ Of course, there are still some who believe in objective policy advice that rests upon evidence-based analysis. But changing views on the nature of rationality from monologic to dialogic, and from the scientist as a privileged advisor to just one of the many different voices informing politics, have ushered in many new modes of argumentative and interpretive policy analysis.